Lot 11: John William North, A.R.A., R.W.S. (1842-1924)

Summer in a Western Wood
signed with initials and dated '1907/JWN/ARA' (lower right), signed again and inscribed 'Summer in a Western Wood [J W North A.R.A.]/... /Taunton' (on the artist's fragmentary label attached to the backboard)
oil on canvas
21 1/4 x 29 1/2 in. (54 x 75 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1908, no. 77.

with Horner Galleries, Sheffield (according to a label on the reverse). Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, Belgravia, 25 October 1977, lot 48 (unsold). Anonymous sale: Sotheby's, Belgravia, 27 June 1978, lot 237.

North thought of himself as a watercolour painter and only occasionally ventured into oils, a medium he took up at the suggestion of G.F. Watts. Examples are therefore rare, although there were three in the Fuller Collection, including the enormous Among the Galtees of 1898 (Christie's, London, 7 April 2000, lot 58). The present picture, however, which appeared at the Royal Academy in 1908, is closer to A Woodland River with Bathers (lot 57), a work of 1904 which is not only comparable in subject but demonstrates with equal force North's love of shifting, evanescent colours and dissolving form.

These qualities owe much to the artist's idiosyncratic oil technique which, as Herbert Alexander wrote in a memorial article in Volume 5 of the Old Water-Colour Society's Club, 'was an endeavour to get as near as possible to the effect of watercolour... Having prepared his canvas with a ground of Chinese white, he rubbed in with warm colour the masses of the composition, then with a very liquid medium of his own called "papoma" he washed in the sky and gave atmosphere to his forms with powder colours, finally glazing the full passages as though he were enamelling.'

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